Main­land notes Tai­wan elec­tions re­flect pub­lic will

A Chi­nese main­land spokesman on Sun­day said the main­land will con­tinue to en­hance sol­i­dar­ity with Tai­wan com­pa­tri­ots and fol­low a path of peace­ful de­vel­op­ment of crossS­traits re­la­tions, after the Kuom­intang Party won 15 seats out of a to­tal of 22 be­ing con­tested dur­ing lo­cal elec­tions in Tai­wan over the week­end.

“We have no­ticed

the re­sults of the elec­tions,” said Ma Xiaoguang, spokesman for the Tai­wan Af­fairs Of­fice of the State Coun­cil, adding that the re­sults re­flected the strong will of the pub­lic in Tai­wan to share the ben­e­fits of peace­ful de­vel­op­ment across the Tai­wan Straits, and their de­sire to im­prove the is­land’s econ­omy and peo­ple’s well-be­ing.

Among the 22 county and city chief posts, the rul­ing Demo­cratic Pro­gres­sive Party landed six, with one go­ing to

The in­de­pen­dent can­di­date, Ko Wen-je, won the elec­tion of Taipei mayor with about 3,200 more votes than Ting Shou-chung, a can­di­date from the Kuom­intang. Ting filed a law­suit to chal­lenge the va­lid­ity of the elec­tion in the early hours of Sun­day.

Tai­wan’s leader, Tsai Ing­wen, re­signed as chair­woman of the Demo­cratic Pro­gres­sive Party on Sat­ur­day night to take re­spon­si­bil­ity for the party’s poor per­for­mance in the lo­cal elec­tions.

The fun­da­men­tal rea­son for the elec­toral de­feat of the Demo­cratic Pro­gres­sive Party is that it did noth­ing to im­prove eco­nomic de­vel­op­ment on the is­land, said Zhang Wen­sheng, deputy head of the Tai­wan Re­search In­sti­tute at Xi­a­men Univer­sity, Fu­jian prov­ince.

He said that an­other rea­son is that the Tsai ad­min­is­tra­tion’s “pro-in­de­pen­dence” se­ces­sion­ism has forced cross-